Putting up Roadblocks to Jesus

Imagine a car speeding towards a cliff - think Thelma and Louise without the suicidal element or that newish Star Trek without the one-eyed floating motorcycle policeman. I’ve often wondered where such roads-in-the-middle-of-nowhere are and why we put roads there. While driving on the Road to the Sun in Montana I wanted as many barriers, speed bumps and large, unmovable rocks between me and the cliff as possible. I want to see the view, to be sure, but I also wanted very clear obstacles to disrupt any driving into the abyss that seemed relatively easy. Now consider that these abyss(es?ees?i?) are relatively accurate representatives of where humanity is headed apart from faith in the Lordship of Jesus, his death, resurrection, reign and trusting in all that he commands. 

There has been a kind of Christianity, popular with us young kids, wherein a type of evangelism and even discipleship is adopted that seeks to remove any teachings, ethical norms, or biblical tones (that’s too harsh!) that might dissuade a young non-Christian from coming to believe in and worship Jesus. The idea is that the loving thing to do is to remove any and all obstacles to a person coming to believe in Jesus. Leave the fatal ethical constructs in place, the inhuman worldview, the incoherent secular dogmas, just get them to believe in a set of theoretical propositions or hold some sentimental feelings about Jesus. That’s the goal. That’s how to get people to become Christians. What you end up with is a really nice Christianity, relatively inoffensive, something that feels loving and which has the rather horrific side effect of allowing people to believe that they can keep any of the other stuff that the old curmudgeonly Christians called sin and unbelief, and still be good Christians. In other words this creates a nice, non-threatening neutered Christianity. It is a Christianity incapable of producing disciples who can stand in the midst a culture which rejects the ethical teaching of the Bible. It is a Christianity incapable of reigning in the overwhelming weight of our own suicidal desires. It is a Christianity incapable of producing a culture of robust truth, and rich beauty and loving, moral goodness. 

You know you’ve encountered such a neutered Christianity in a church when the only courageous stands you hear from the pulpit or in a church’s teaching has to do with what everybody in unbelieving mainstream culture already believes. This has its more nationalist-conservative versions and its more secular-liberal versions. It pops up in Texas looking one way and it pops up in Denver looking another, but wherever it pops up it creates a whole community of people who believe that they are Christians because they either have warm thoughts about Jesus or they’ve believed a set of isolated theoretical principles about who Jesus is, you know, way up in the sky somewhere. Neither version pushes into he corners of a person’s life. It never touches the ground. It never confronts with real-time cultural sins being committed right now. Its never concrete. 

It fails to produce real disciples of Jesus, disciples who repent of sin and unbelief, whose lives are growing in conformity to the teachings of Scripture and the good demands of Jesus. It produces Christians who largely look and act and believe just like their secularist neighbors. 

If a person can come to believe in Jesus without some of their deepest-held beliefs and desires and behaviors being confronted, then there is a very good chance that this person has not really come to Jesus. If real repentance from real sin is not pressed - if a person believes they can keep having sex with whomever they want (with consent of course) and that belief and behavior isn’t confronted in the process of coming to believe in Jesus, then they aren’t coming to Jesus. If a person’s financial habits are never confronted, their way of talking to or about people, their work ethic, how they treat their family or love their wife or discipline their children - then the things the Bible actually speaks to aren’t being addressed, and that should smell really fishy to us. The Jesus we meet in Scripture made demands, remarkable demands. He refused to serve anyone else’s agenda. He confronted those who would follow him in the most pointed and personal ways. Demanding a rich man sell everything to follow him in one place, demanding another leave his parents behind in another. Jesus made it hard to follow Jesus. Who are we to make it any easier?

This kind of Christian evangelism and mission is almost the complete opposite of older forms of Christianity, where the Law’s confrontation of our particular sins was essential to repentance and faith. Where does the Law condemn me? Where does the Law declare me guilty on account of the way I am living? It is precisely here that my need for the grace of God, and the kindness of God is made clear. It is here where the necessity of the cross is made plain. It is here where I can see the cost of believing in and following Jesus. The Law does not confront humans in abstract ways calling us to warmer feelings about Jesus. No, through the Law, God names, confronts and condemns our actual sins. The things we love and do. This never feels good, and is almost never considered loving in a culture like ours. But God saves us through the work of Jesus and calls us to repentance from sins and to faith in the person and work of Jesus. 

Conversion to Christianity happens when a person hits a roadblock and turns. They are driving into an abyss, and in the mercy of God the law of God comes like a big set of flashing lights and railing to call you to turn. Sure they’re annoying. They are in the way. The ministry of the church must be a ministry of putting things in the way - disruptive things, oftentimes painful things, but if coming to Jesus is easy - if it isn’t costly, then there is a very good change we’ve simply mislabeled the abyss and misunderstood the mission of God given to the church. This is, of course quite risky. Its how Christianity gets a bad reputation among the cool kids. But it is the remarkably devastating message that Jesus has given to the church- a message about his authority over all things, his death for our terrible sins, and his conquering of death - the penalty for all those sins. So church, do the work of the gospel: Put up roadblocks. 

What to Do When Everybody's Hair is on Fire...

Everyone seems to have set their hair on fire. The word “unprecedented” has been used so often in the past 8 months as to cause a great deal of confusion about what “precedented” is supposed to be. We have an “unprecedented” pandemic (it increasingly looks like it follows several other historic precedents- but I get it.) We have an “unprecedented” election (that one may be true). We have unprecedented social unrest. We had an unprecedented dinner the other night when a friend made some sort of sourdough pancake/bread/English muffin magical item which I didn’t know existed. When everything is unprecedented, Christians might be tempted to just float through the chaos, being tossed by every rapid, slamming into every rock, but there is supposed to be something steadying about what we say we believe. There is supposed to be something rock-like in what we sing and pray and confess.  

When everything is unprecedented, what is the church to do? 

The author of Hebrews is writing to Christians surrounded by chaos and groaning and very serious times. These Christians were being tempted to turn back from their faith in Jesus in order to avoid persecution. Some were simply avoiding the gathering of God’s people in order to keep up appearances. But there were all sorts of questions about when and how to worship in the light of the coming of Jesus and in the midst of societal chaos and difficulties. In chapter 10:19-25 the author says this:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

- Hebrews 10:19-25

Now this little passage is chalk full of wonderful reminders and encouragement. But I want to focus on the exhorting at the end: 

Hold fast the confession 

Stir one another to love and good works

Do not neglect to gather together

Encourage one another. 

The book of Hebrews is very concerned with the worship of the Church- how the liturgy of the church has replaced the worship of the tabernacle and temple. In other words, Hebrews is about the life and worship of the church as much, if not more than it is concerned about mere individuals. This is a book concerned with the question of What is the church to do? The church is to hold fast our confession - our hope. Here is a hope anchored somewhere outside electoral results. Here is a confession about Jesus and his work that is unshaken by viruses and doesn’t depend on the magistrate for salvation or for freedom. Here are clean bodies and purified consciences - not made clean by distances, masks, lots of hand sanitizer or anything of the like, but made clean by God. I hope you caught that because there are a lot of people doing a lot of things to try and make their consciences clean. Rushdoony (in Politics of Guilt and Shame) believed it explained most of our political disagreements. Your body and your conscience can only be washed clean by God…. by God.

So what is the church to do in these days?: 

Gather for worship. Hold to our confession in hope. Stir one another up to fulfill the vocations God has given us towards love and fruitfulness. Encourage one another. In other words, the church is to do what the church is always supposed to do. 

We are not to do unprecedented things. We are to do precedented things. Things that the church has always done, has always been called to do. We do not react, we persevere in the works that God has called us to - calling all men and women to come, to repent of their sins, to eat bread and to drink wine, and to hope in God. 

A Statement to All You Feisty Maskers and Anti-Maskers at Trinity

Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. - 2 Timothy 2:23

Trinity Church,

Every Sunday as we worship together we say the Apostle’s Creed. This 1700 year old confession marks the church’s unity. In a world of divided allegiances and controversies, we gather each week to confess and to be reminded that we are united in our confession of the Triune God instead of being divided by the various factions that mark our world.

Our society, over this past year, has been catechizing us to turn every division into a political division and every division into a division between love and liberty. We have even taken a thing like a piece of cloth over ones’ nose and mouth and made it a thing of heated moral division in our culture. I am concerned that such divisions have made their way into our young community. As a church body we have taken the position that we will not have a position on mask-wearing or anti-mask-wearing. We believe it to be an issue of conscience left to each household to decide how to approach this issue. We do not enforce mask-wearing in our gathered worship and people are free to wear a mask at our services or not. We provide different worship spaces (the balcony maintains more space between households, we offer audio outside on the lawn, and transmit the service via radio for those wishing to remain in their cars) for those who want or need more space or isolation and everyone is free to wear a mask if they choose.

But more importantly this is an issue which we will not be divided over. And to that end I want to speak to both groups in our church community:

To those of you who have been convinced that masks are not wise or good: There are those among us, godly members of this church who do not believe what you believe about masks. They have any number of reasons for believing that mask wearing is an urgent health need in our day. There are good medical professionals and scientists, many of whom are committed to the Scriptures and the authority of Jesus, who back this claim and believe that mask wearing in our society is best right now. Please do not assume that mask-wearers are simply enslaved lemmings. Do not assume that they are terrorized by some irrational fear. Your temptation during these times will be towards a kind of scoffing pride. Do not do this. Such pride could harm you and our church for whom Christ died. Your commitment to liberty is a good thing, after all Paul tells us that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But do not let your liberty be an excuse to look down on your brother and sister for whom Christ died. They likely have very good reasons for wearing their masks.

To those of you who are convinced that wearing masks are the best way right now: There are godly members of this church who do not believe what you believe about masks. There are good medical professionals and scientists, many of whom are Christians who believe that for the majority of our society masks are an unwise way to proceed and cause more harm to us and our neighbors than good. Please do not assume that those not wearing masks, particularly in this community, simply don’t love their neighbor or care about your well-being. Your temptation will be to elevate extra-biblical standards to define love. Do not do this. Such self-righteousness could destroy you and harm this community for whom Christ died. Your commitment to love your neighbors is good, after all Jesus has commanded us to love our neighbors, but do not use your good intentions as an opportunity to sin against your non-mask-wearing brothers and sisters. They likely have very good reasons for not wearing masks.

I want to say as forcefully as I can- We will not be divided over mask-wearing. Do research, trust to God’s providence and care, and then let each of you do what is best. The Bible calls us to all kinds of commands on how to pursue liberty and love together without adding the dividing mark of mask wearing or anti-mask-wearing. In a society that is totalizing narratives about masks - telling stories about love and liberty, our refusal to be divided over such a thing is a necessary form of resistance. If you are afraid, the Word of God gently confronts you with the wonderful command: Do not be afraid. If you are reckless in your freedom, the Word of God gently confronts you with the wonderful command: Love your brother and sister.

May we be eager to obey the numerous ways that Scripture teaches us to pursue liberty and to practice love. And may our liberty and love be expressed not in masking or unmasking, but in our confession of the absolute authority of Jesus over all things, even our faces and certainly our fears.

Lastly, one of the clearest commands given to us in Scripture is to not “forsake the gathering together” (Hebrews 10:23-25) of God’s people. In addition to learning new divisions in this time, God’s people are inadvertently learning to disobey this command from our Lord. We want to encourage all of you to be dligent to resist temptations to forsake the gathering of God’s people in worship. This is not about asserting some abstract principle of rights, but about honoring our King and attending to the means of grace given to us in being together to receive Word and Sacrament. So, in short, come to church.

The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. As for the person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned. - Titus 3:4-11

Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. - 2 Timothy 2:23

I appeal to you brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. - Romans 16:17

I appeal to you brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. - 1 Cor. 1:10

For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part. - 1 Cor. 11:18

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is one, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit. Let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. - Galatians 5:19-25

It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit. - Jude 19

Painting a Car with a Hammer

“This is the most important election of our lifetime”

Probably not, but maybe. 

But even if it is, its likely not as important as you think and definitely not important in the way you think. 

Nero’s early empire ruling in Rome was a pretty great time for most everybody. The theater was opened up again. Games returned. Christians were largely left alone and the Jews could start returning to Rome. Everything seemed to be headed in a mostly decent direction. Nero’s “second term” was a different thing altogether (a good reminder is that killing your mother has significant consequences for ones’ leadership). Pretty soon impaled Christians  are being used as torches for garden parties, Nero is forcing renovation projects to significant parts of the city by starting large, devastating fires, and well the whole political machine had went a bit mad. We get some of the best bits of the New Testament as Paul, John and Peter tried to prepare the church for navigating the fiery end of Nero’s “Make Rome Great Again” projects. 

I’m not offering any prophetic insight into what’s coming through either an extended Trump presidency or a Biden one, but I do want to ask everybody (myself included) to take a nice, deep breath and chuckle at ourselves a bit. It can be easy to get enraged or laugh at the other side of this coming election. But I think we need some good universal Christian laughter, the kind of laughter grounded in a healthy view of God as the author of history.  If you find yourself wound up at the latest outrage posted on Facebook by that girl you never really trusted after middle school, I would argue that you’re forgetting a few key things about politics and God. What happens next week in the election (let alone on your facebook feed) matters far less than you probably think it does. And it matters differently than you think it does. Don’t misunderstand me, the election certainly matters. Our elected officials fulfilling their rightly ordained vocations is important for the peace of society. But I think we generally forget some things and over sell some things when we think about who is going to be elected President or who’s running for any other government (be it local, state, or federal) office. 

Firstly - a thing we forget.

God draws straight with crooked lines. The Bible is absolutely clear, God is going to get us where He wants to get us. But he doesn’t usually take the route you’d have taken if you were in charge of the roadtrip map. As the drivers in our family have doubled in the last year, so have the opinions about which route is the best/safest/fastest/prettiest to most everywhere. God loves curveballs, knuckleballs, and taking “wrong” turns (I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but that’s part of what God likes to do as well.) He is generally doing a million things in a situation where we are primarily concerned about only 1 or 2. We’re really hoping for an A on our Physics test, while God is moving the universe around and hoping we see the sun peaking through the clouds in that slim little window that looks out over the park from our classroom. We’re often playing baseball when God is doing something far more interesting - like nuclear physics brain surgery. 

God was acting through the good and the terrible parts of Nero’s reign. It wasn’t his work the first few years and then something out of control the last part. God was strategically acting in all of it. Now it is important to note, that there is such a thing as a norm by which we can assess the good parts and the terrible parts as being good or terrible. But God wasn’t bound in his work by Nero. Nero was a means for God’s good purposes whatever his particular actions and policies. 

At whatever point the election is finalized next week (hopefully!), what we can be sure of is that God has given us what we have. This isn’t to short change anyone’s responsibilities to vote thoughtfully and Christianly, but it is  to say that God is doing something on purpose whomever ends up waking up in the White House this Spring. 

Secondly - Remember what the Magistrate is for. 

In the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom McKenzie asks Jeff Daniels’ character a question loaded with a common and problematic assumption in our day.  She asks, “Is government a force for good or is it every man for himself?” She’s in the middle of a great little monologue that exposes where and how our hope lay for a better world. Both the Right and Left are tempted terribly by the idea that government and politics are tools for the building of their vision of what the world should be. We start with very different visions of the good, the beautiful and true for society, and then we expect a government who will give us that. We subtly begin to believe that the magistrate is the fundamental tool for achieving human flourishing. This is a poisonous religious belief. And it leads directly to the kinds of incoherent and screeching discourse that we find in our politics today. 

The government - whatever its particular design, is incapable of creating human virtue.  It is not made for cultivating love. It will never be very effective at sustaining faith and its attendant obedience to God - necessary conditions for the long-term thriving of humanity as a whole. Economic flourishing can not be created by a government. Neither can social flourishing or real, positive goodness. The sort of generosity where people give of their very lives to one another and where business owners give of their very profits for the further thriving of their employees - neither of these can be created or sustained by governments. Joy-filled, faithful and healthy families cannot be built by the government, even though you cannot have a sound economy or healthy human beings without them. We can try to use government to prop up a society that lacks these things, but very soon such an arrangement will lead to increasingly serious problems. 

There is a subtle belief on the Right, that I witnessed living in various places throughout the U.S. that somehow we can create a good and noble society. We can make families strong. We can end the pervasiveness of pornography and its attendant lusts. We can improve hunting season and make Christmas better. All of this if we can only get the right people into office. This isn’t (obviously) universal, but it is a real temptation and it is founded on a belief that the government can do things that it was never designed by God to do. 

There is a belief on the Left, that I encounter daily living here in Colorado. It is the belief that we can build a good and equitable society by political means. We can end poverty. We can make it so no one feels excluded and everybody is safe - from viruses, from narrow people, and from any future apocalyptic environmental catastrophes. And all of this can be so if we can simply get the right people and policies into the right governmental spot. This isn’t universal, but I will say it is a temptation and a prevalent one on the left. A vision for an activist government virtually requires a belief that government can give us the society that we think we want. 

But this is like painting a car with a hammer. You might smear some paint on there, but your doing the wrong thing. God gave us the magistrate for some fairly specific purposes (to punish evil, protect the innocent, and to protect space wherein liberty and righteousness might flourish) and it was never designed to do the job that the church and the family was made to do. Sorkin’s dichotomy was a false one. In the world that God has made, it is never every man for himself, but neither should we look to the government as our source for the growth of good. 

For far too long we have demanded of our politicians (and they have been eager to oblige) that they promise to create the great society. We demand that they give us hope. We ask them to transform the tattered fabric of our cities, to overcome what amounts to collective sin.  Look at the two campaign slogans on offer from our current candidates: “Battle for the soul of the nation” and “Make America Great Again!” - these are both breathtaking claims. When the magistrate takes up such projects, it never goes well. They cannot do this and we should stop asking them to, in fact we should be far more suspect when they start making those kinds of claims. 

This isn’t to say that Tuesday’s election doesn’t matter for the promotion of a just and good society. Its just to say that it doesn’t matter that way. We should elect magistrates who will do the job that’s been entrusted to them by God, and outlined quite satisfactorily in the Constitution. We should expect of them that they will do the job they’ve been given faithfully. And then we should get busy doing the rather mundane work of raising families, hard work with our minds and hands in the places where God has given us work to do, and learning to live as Christian men and women who love their neighbors and who worship and obey the triune God.  And we should keep doing those things regardless of who wins the presidential election on Tuesday. We should keep pursuing those things no matter what policies or laws or newfangled attempts at transforming society into some utopian and disease-free dream come down the pike. God is on his throne, the president and everybody else answer to him. May we get on with the great work of seeing the world filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. 

Singing Different

On Friday evening we’re going to start a new monthly (at least) practice around Trinity wherein we are going to begin gathering to learn how to sing together - particularly learning some hymns, psalms and other songs taken directly from Scripture. And while getting together to sing may not be particularly strange for a church to do, what we hope to learn to do is how to sing beautifully together by learning to sing different musical parts together. You see, what normally happens when the church gathers to sing on a Sunday is that a few skilled musicians perform the music up front, and the congregation listens or joins in by singing in unison with the primary vocalist leading the music. The benefit of the church performing her music this way is its simplicity. It allows the church to adopt popular musical styles and allows what we think of as non-musicians (the vast majority of us) to participate in the church’s music without having to learn any new skills (other than lyrics and generally easily mimicked tunes). But when compared to the way much of the church has sung in the past, these gains come with some significant losses.  We want to start learning how to do something a bit older and quite a bit different than our normal practice on Sunday mornings and so we’re going to start learning this old way on Friday evening. 

The development of music and singing in Scripture provides some wonderful insight into its purpose in the church’s worship. Without launching into a full blown biblical theology of singing and music I want to point to a few things that are, for me at least, newish thoughts:

1 - Singing specifically, and musical development more generally is attached quite remarkably to the coming and enthronement of kings throughout the New and Old Testaments. Saul’s coronation is preceded by a band of singing prophets.  David establishes royal and priestly musicians and singers upon his own enthronement as king. One of the great scenes (of many) in Revelation is the commissioning of the Lamb at the Throne in Revelation 5. Here the elders and all the heavenly host and eventually all of creation itself sings in celebration of the One on the throne and the Lamb who is commissioned by God to conquer the nations. 

2 - This imagery and the event that corresponds to it (namely Jesus’ own ascension at the beginning of Acts (and described in Daniel 7) points us to another link with the singing of God’s people that clues us into its purpose.  It is often attached to the military - or God’s hosts, which is simply our nice way of saying God’s army. The armies of Israel are led into battle by the Levites singing God’s songs. The Lamb who is the Son of Man is commissioned to conquer the nations in Revelation 5 and sends out his horsemen in Revelation 6 and they are accompanied by song. The singing of God’s songs by God’s people marks their commissioning by their King into and among the nations. It is the music of a host, an army, a people sent by their king. 

3 - Lastly (though there is a lot more that should be said), you can trace a development from the music established by David throughout the history Old Testament worship (and reaching its pinnacle in the New) as the blood sacrifices are first accompanied by and then slowly replaced by the sacrifices of song (along with the atoning blood of Jesus.) In other words, as central and particular as the sacrifices of Tabernacle and Temple worship were, so also should the church’s music be in its own worship in God’s presence. Our singing should accompany our full hearted belief and allegiance to our King. Our singing should have a militancy about it - it marks us as a sent people. And our singing should be as central to our worship and as intentionally done as many of the offerings were to Israel’s own worship. These realities should shape not only our concern for the lyrical truthfulness of our singing, but also our concern for style and skill and congregational involvement. 

Our prayer is that as we all learn some new skills (how to read musical lines, learning to sing different harmonies together, learning to sing Scripture) we will grow as a congregation both in our ability to sing, but also in being formed in some new and enriched ways by the music we sing. Our hope is that soon music will fill every part of our church’s life- whether gathered in a living room or on a Sunday, that we will learn to sing skillfully and with all our hearts together whether there is someone there to play guitar or not. 

Contagious Belly Laughs

In the midst of a world whose madness keeps getting more pronounced and whose madness promises to get even more pronounced in the next week or so - what are all you clear-headed folks to do? When mayors are threatening to cancel Christmas, churches are holding sad-faced segregated diversity sensitivity trainings, and racist Boogala-fire-breathers from the right are threatening to attack cities over against masked Antifa-er brick-throwers on the left, what should Christians be doing? Do we mournfully wear our masks, avoid worshipping together and go along with the whole thing quietly, with our quiet, sensitive voices? Do we angrily demand “our freedoms” and buy more ammo? When the culture is convulsing and having a whole bunch of remarkably emotional fits - How are the people of God to respond - like if we actually believe the Gospel is true? 

Proposal: Deep, cascading, belly laughs. The sort that go all the way down to your toes. 

Wait a minute (I can hear some of you saying in the back), shouldn’t we be a bit more, well, sad? Maybe even afraid of what’s to come. Shouldn’t we treat All This Seriousness with a bit more seriousness - with furrowed brows, and soft glistening eyes, and an understanding nod? What about all this death? What about all this economic and psychological suffering? What about what could happen if That Guy is president in February?

Well, to clarify, you should weep with those who weep. You should stand by and with those who suffer. But I don’t mean anything like abstract people with abstract weeping. If you see your neighbor in need, sick, without much hope - don’t laugh at them.  If someone you know is suffering a terrible injustice, don’t laugh at them. But as you stand back and look at the world losing its collective mind, laugh deeply, heartily. Be a jolly lover of neighbors and weeper with weepers. And do not be frightened by the madness that swirls around right now. 

There are two grounds for this jolly laughter. Two things I would implore you to hold on to as we continue to worship together on Sundays, turn to the Bible for how to understand everything, and do our best to practice hospitality to one another and our neighbors. Here are two reasons we must keep singing, and laughing as we do so. 

First: In Romans 8:18ff., God promises that the suffering surrounding the Christians in Rome (which in the context includes things like poverty, sickness, hunger and slaughter in verses 35-36), once its all collected and accounted for will be accounted as nothing compared to the weight of the beauty and goodness to be given to us through all of it.  It is scary. It is truly painful. But it is the birth pains of glory. Magnificent, overwhelming glory. For all who belong to Jesus, we find ourselves in the birthing room and there seems to be a lot happening right now. It may even seem like chaos, like sadness and death are certain (after all we are in a hospital). But something altogether beautiful is happening. God is doing all of this right now. People are losing their minds and there’s a lot of noise, but God is subjecting the whole world to this futility, and He’s doing so in hope. Oh just wait - Paul says in verse 25, you can’t see it yet, but everything is going to be just glorious. 

Second: This is all well and good, but does it justify the laughter I’m advocating for? Why all the laughing? In Psalm 2 God shows us what this patient hope looks like when confronted with the convulsions coming from the nations. Here is what God does in Psalm 2:4, “He who sits in the heavens laughs…” The nations, with very serious faces and complex crayon-colored diagrams align themselves against God and his rule - his truth, his beauty and his goodness. They press against His sanity, His order, with very serious plans to cancel Christmas this year. And right when you expect to hear a fire-breathing roar from heaven, instead you hear infectious laughter. It is a laughter that unravels rebellion and the fears of His people and sets God’s enemies to flee. It is a laughter, rooted in the glorious hope Paul talks about in Romans above. You cannot stop the glory He is delivering right now. 

I imagine God’s laughter to be the most glorious sound in all the universe. And like all good laughter it is unavoidably infectious. Laughter spills into a room and pretty soon everybody whose in on it can’t help themselves. I remember sitting in a room as people told stories about my mom after she died. I was pretty sad. I was weeping. And yet some of those stories, I mean, she was a doozy, absolutely hilarious. And then somebody, I don’t remember who, started having a laughing fit - just like my mom used to have. And soon, in the midst of all the tears the whole room was laughing uncontrollably. The One Who Sits in Heaven laughs way better than that. And when all his enemies come together, he laughs.

So, Christian, learn to laugh at these days. Live and worship and love as those who are free: truly free. Forgiven of all our sins, children of the God who owns and runs all things, and living in the world that is His to give. Drink wine, sing and celebrate the days that are to come. And when you see the world’s madness - laugh all the way down to your toes. 

Shaking

We worship a God who delights to shake things. He has done so again and again and again throughout our short history. This can be the cause of no small amount of confusion. And if you don’t know what’s coming, or what to expect, it can lead to a kind of unnecessary despair. Let me explain.

You find yourself in the normal rhythms of everyday life here in 21st century America. You’re ordering your burrito on your phone, meeting friends for happy hour, observing relatively normal political disagreements in the various Op-Ed sections of the newspaper and otherwise enjoying all the conveniences of modern day living. Here things are, continuing as they always have, only with more burritos, nifty cameras that fit in your pocket, and better TV. Your job is okay, your kids are going to school everyday, you aren’t embarrassed by the President, and you can go up to the mountains often enough. You spend your days largely concerned about how many burritos your eating, how much screen time your kids are digesting, and how you can get to the mountains a little more often. Then a pandemic hits. Your kids are now on their screens 10 hours a day to get their math homework, which is just beyond what you can recall from your own math classes. You can’t buy burritos anymore because all the burrito shops are closed. The mountain towns have become viral swamps according to the news, so you can’t go there to get away from it all. Politics have turned into a giant dumpster fire and then there are the literal fires. What, only 8 months ago was mostly a nice, normal world with some idiosyncrasies that were a bit annoying, has become an apocalyptic ball of uncertainty with no sign of where we can land this mad plane. 

Now in the middle of all this, if you forget what I said up front, namely “We worship a God who delights to shake things,” you could be confused, even a little riddled with anxiety. You might think this is all just a big ball of madness being thrown into a washing machine filled with radioactive goo. But you’d be forgetting one of the most fundamental things God does, and you’d miss that this madness isn’t a flaw of this whole thing called history, but rather a feature. God shakes things and he does so according to plan. In other words, these things aren’t chaos, but rather they are headed somewhere on purpose.

The author of Hebrews reminds God’s people in chapter 12:26-29

“At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

This shaking is filled with glorious purpose. We’ll see this weekend in Romans 8 that it is a shaking accompanied by groaning and suffering - real suffering. But that the glory that will be revealed on the other side will cause us to count that suffering as nothing. Think about that for a minute or two (or well, a lot longer)… All this shaking and the accompanying fall-out - which can be devastating and could get quite a bit worse - all of that loss which is real and the Bible doesn’t make light of (and we shouldn’t either) will be nothing compared to the glorious and gracious accomplishment of God. 

You see, He shakes in order to establish that which can’t be shaken. Here is a God who, with glee, overturns all our perceived stabilities in order to give us what is truly stable. He overturns all our mediocre beauty for what is in fact beautiful and glorious and good. So what are we to do with all this shaking? Well, we should do what the author of Hebrews instructs us to do: Worship with awe and reverence. Gather with the saints, tremble and marvel in the presence of a God who can shake everything, worship Him and then, give thanks for this kingdom He loves to give in the shaking - an unshakeable kingdom full of beauty and grace. 

He isn't Reacting.

Most Wednesdays I get out of the city, head up to the mountains, and take a seat perched above the South Platte River. I spend those Wednesdays wrestling with the text I’ll be preaching the upcoming Sunday, praying, and being reminded of something absolutely essential in our age. Here I see gallons and gallons of water steadily pouring down the valley. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t wait to consider what’s happening all around. It asks no questions about the upcoming presidential election or what latest controversies are boiling in the lives of people around it. Here are trees, big evergreens and a small grove of aspens, swaying in the wind but mostly just standing there, oblivious to all the concerns and the latest outrages everyone’s all jazzed about. Here are mountains, definitely unmoved by all the things that throw us around, changing our blood pressure, anxiously spinning our thoughts and emotions as we are moved by an endless wave of news and scandals and trends. It dawns on me this particular Wednesday that here is an entire world, full of glory and life and death and all manner of things - speaking constantly about the sovereignty, power and majesty of God - and it has almost no regard for the things that consume most of our lives and news cycles. 

And then, still sitting in this same spot, I consider the Scriptures themselves. Here is testimony and law and song and grace upon grace fixed on pages by God’s Spirit. All of them witness to God’s sovereignty, His power and his majesty. All of them unmoved by our fears and ambitions and tragedies. Here is a rock of God’s revelation - of truth and beauty and goodness that is not concerned with responding to all our latest foolishness and not attempting to coddle us in our sins and anxieties. Rather, here is a word that simply and gloriously stands, in the midst of all our madness and seeming chaos, it stands and speaks the same word over and over and over again - unchanging, unconfused. And such a word, in a culture such as ours, can be a rather remarkable anchor. An unmoved Word in the midst of stormy seas and a cacophony of voices demanding your attention. Here is another grace given to us in the Bible - a steady and sure word.

The Westminster Confession (echoing the author of Hebrews words) tells us in chapter 1: “Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing…” 

“…for the…comfort of the church…” 

God has given us these sure words, these unchanging words for the “comfort of the church.” It isn’t simply the content of His words that are to comfort God’s people, it is also the simple fact of their existence, their unchanging nature is itself to be a comfort to the church. These trees, this river, these mountains do what they do - and they keep doing what they do, because God has commanded them to and only because God commands them to. These words, in this marvelous book called the Bible, they are given to us, unchanging, as a comfort, a steadying rail as we’re shoved and pushed and spinning around often confused by the storms that swirl around us. 

Another thing strikes me in considering this comfort: God is not reacting. He is not spinning around, scrambling to make sure he stays ahead of the latest trouble or confusion. He isn’t coming up with new responses to address an ever changing world. He isn’t updating his research in light of new sociological and scientific data. He has spoken. His word and his words stand forever. When we return to dust, with our political and social agendas, his words will remain - always doing what they were intended to do. When we return to dust, with our anxieties and addictions and rebellions, his words will remain - always doing what they were intended to do. 

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” - Matthew 24:35

“I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word.” - Psalm 138:2

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” - Isaiah 55:10-11

The Good News of Specificity

There is a big difference between simply saying “I love you” and saying “I love *this* about you” as a dad. Oh, we should and must tell our children that we love them, but there is something powerful in expressing specific delight in some aspect of who your children are. There’s a big difference in telling your children to “behave” or “be responsible” and telling your kids to clean up their rooms, brush their teeth and go to bed at a certain time. The specificity matters, its an important part - both in expressing delight and in shaping behavior. But such specificity can be hard - both in parenting and in the work of evangelism and discipleship in the church. 

One of the more subtle ways that otherwise bible-believing Christians avoid God is through our tendency to believe and confess in generalities. We can accept the Bible’s teaching on sin, the need for repentance and confession, the kingdom of God, the call to believe in Jesus and to then obey him. Pastor’s will teach these things. Christians will get together and talk about these things, read about these things and admonish one another concerning these things. But they all remain marvelously general. They never touch the ground. Sin is treated as generally as possible. We might occasionally confront things like pornography or esoteric concepts like pride or a failure to love - but I find it rare that we will talk about specific sins and specific instances of biblical obedience in the concrete realities of everyday life. I think we avoid concreteness in our own lives and in pastor’s sermons for a few reasons. 

Living in one of the most divided eras in our culture’s memory, I think we are terrified of interpersonal conflict. And while the Bible confronts ideas and philosophies, it does so by confronting concrete behaviors. While it commends faith and obedience to Jesus, it does so through concrete actions and relationships and practices. If we begin to get specific with either our own behaviors or the lives of our neighbors and friends, the teaching of Scripture goes from being a theoretical set of potentially appealing ideas to actually confronting real lives, real addictions, real fears, and real comforts. The command of Scripture is not simply an esoteric call to have some new ideas layered on top of a life lived in modern, secularist and individualist terms. It is a specific call to believe something new about the world and God and ourselves and to therefore live differently in that world. This necessarily means conflict with specific ways that we or our neighbors are actually living. And while conflict can be done really poorly. It ought to be pursued in love and because of love. Evangelism will involve conflict. Discipleship will involve conflict. Conflict is often very painful - strong relationships can be shattered. Our own need to be well-liked or respected can be threatened. Its often right here, when we start talking about specific ways that God has commanded us to live that we can find ourselves embarrassed because of how God speaks or feeling the pain of our own need to repent of specific behaviors and change. Specificity creates conflict in our own lives and with our friends. 

Another reason we avoid this specificity is fear. It is easy to appear courageous when a pastor stands up and preaches about sin and the need to repent of sin, the centrality of the cross, and the offer of forgiveness. But to do so without naming specific ways that real people and real ideas and real behaviors are in conflict with God and what He says is to treat the gospel as a series of theological platitudes. If we champion the systematic teachings of Scripture without speaking to the specific ways it calls people and cultures to real repentance and obedience, then we may sound bold and orthodox and courageous, but we’ve avoided the actual places where courage and boldness are needed. 

But one of the glorious implications of the incarnation is that holiness and obedience and faith have been seen and touched and heard. James warns us that faith without the (concrete) fruit of obedience is a dead faith. God’s gracious gift of the law and the prophets, as well as the gospels and the New Testament letters gives us enormous amounts of material to learn how to trust God and to obey God in all manner of different circumstances. The danger of sin remaining in the esoteric realm is that God’s mercy remains there as well. Instead of wonderfully concrete instances of confessing our specific sins and believing on God’s grace for those specific moments - we can be haunted by a vague sense of guilt, God’s grace can become just a generalized sense that God loves us despite the fact that we are marred by sin. Obedience becomes defined and driven more by generalities and less by the actual biblical commands and examples that can bear rich fruit in our lives. It gets reduced to common cultural norms dictated by secularist ideas from the right or from the left. But God has given us more than this. He has called us to repent of real ways that we’ve failed to obey his word. He offers forgiveness and grace for specific deeds and attitudes and ideas that we confess. 

We must make sure we aren’t simply taking Christian concepts and layering them on top of lives being lived however we want. We should insure that our evangelism isn’t doing the same thing with those who don’t believe - merely inviting them to adopt a new set of ideas to fit neatly into lives lived in rebellion against God. The Gospel addresses specific people with specific sin and specific needs with a remarkably specific hope. 

Come and Welcome

For the past 7 months we have been trained to regard ourselves as quite dangerous. We’re surrounded by signs and policies commanding us to keep our distance from one another. We quarantine the healthy. We are told we must cover our faces for the sake of love. Even our skin color has become a source of danger for others. Whiteness needs to be isolated just as the old racists believed (and believe) that blackness should be. We’ve been catechized, discipled to believe that in order to love our neighbor we must repent of our skin, stay away from one another, and cover our faces - the part of us designed to uniquely reflect God’s glory (2 Corinthians 3-4). This is a catechism from hell and it must be resisted.

The church’s witness has been badly compromised in these days. Not because we’ve necessarily abandoned the creeds, but because we’ve abandoned or neglected what is the necessary fruit of those creeds. We’ve forsaken the gathering of the church for disembodied video streaming, reinforcing the message that everyone is safer at home. We’ve abandoned the one table where we share bread and wine together, adopting instead individualized communion, segregated seminars where we are sheltered from one another’s skin, and buffet-style Sundays where the people of God eat one church’s online music, drink another’s online preaching, and abandon the practice of hospitality for one another and to our neighbors. We’ve done these things in the name of love and justice, destroying both in the process.  Hell wants this - to call evil good and to call good evil. Hell wants this - to reinforce the animosities that have haunted our nation’s past. Hell wants this- a people fearful of what the other people might be carrying, what they might breathe, or even who they are. In the name of love, indeed in the name of justice, such madness must be resisted. 

Each Sunday the liturgy begins with a call to worship. Here God calls his people together, as their father, to worship, to pray, to read, to baptize and to eat. He welcomes us as his children -brothers and sisters, not as potential disease-carrying threats. He brings us together, not as embodiments of racist oppression or victimization, but as one family, one tribe gathered from the nations of the earth. He calls us to testify in song and prayer with faces reflecting his glory and grace. He issues an invitation to come and be welcomed home, to be together in his presence with lives that overlap, breath and song that overlaps, and even bread and wine that overlap. We meet one another as a redeemed people. We meet one another as forgiven people. We meet one another, with bodies and faces and stories to tell. Unlearn the unhuman catechism. Worship the triune God with body and with people. Go to church. Come and Welcome.

Three Governments and the Government

A Primer on Governments and Authority

As we near the upcoming delight known as the United States election, I thought it might be good to provide a basic primer on how government and authority work from within the Christian tradition - and particularly the reformed Christian tradition. This will have the effect of telling you what bumper stickers to buy, which neighbors to harass and, hopefully, who to direct your angry electorate letter to. I specify the “reformed tradition” because the Anabaptists have their own take (its wrong, and frankly kind of weird - but prevalent in our day), the Catholics have theirs (its terrifyingly wrong), and the Anglicans’ theirs (its interestingly wrong). So here’s a swing at a relatively short explanation of it: 

Christians begin with a basic and yet all-encompassing confession: Jesus is Lord.

Jesus tells his disciples that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him. The announcement of the Kingdom of God is a claim laid upon all the earth, every nation and every sphere. Nobody and no institution is excluded from all of heaven and earth.  Everybody and everything is answerable to him, they have to obey him. 

To make it more explicit: You have to obey him. Your neighbor has to obey him. Congress has to obey him. The Supreme Court has to obey him. The mayor of Denver has to obey him. The Starbucks manager has to obey him. This is necessarily uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable. There will be a god ruling over every particular thing - every government, every family, every individual. To deny that Jesus should be obeyed in all these spheres is to say that Jesus should be disobeyed in some of these spheres and that is a denial of the basic Christian confession: Jesus is Lord. 

Does this mean that America should be a “Christian nation”? Well, yes, now that you ask, it does. To deny this, is to say that God wants America to be a secular nation, to disregard his character, his laws, his justice, etc. To deny this, is to say that God wants America to find some other standard by which to evaluate its life. To deny this is to deny the commission of Jesus himself who told us to “Disciple the Nations.” What standard can we as Christians appeal to beyond the words of God? Some say “Common sense.” But there isn’t really much of that around anymore. Some say, “the will of the people.” But that’s terrifying. The will of the people has frequently led to some rather devastating horrors. A society that grows out of the worship of the triune God would reflect his character, his grace, his law and his love - and none of these things are in conflict. Every society will have a god. All laws are religious laws. The question is which god’s laws are they? And is that god a good one?

But I am getting away from myself. The main point here, is that Jesus possesses all the authority that is.

The Bible establishes other authorities underneath his authority. In the Scriptures we see three fundamental governments that are given authority over different areas of responsibility: the family, the church, and the government (or the magistrate). All three governments have their own lanes, their own particular responsibilities. All three governments are given tools by which to exercise their responsibilities in the world. All three governments are to explicitly obey Jesus as they do the things they’ve been called to do. 

The Family: The family is given the ministry of raising and discipling (education) children, the well-being and flourishing of people through healthcare, as well as the production of wealth and fruitfulness. The father is given responsibility to rule his home and to see it bear fruit (think raise godly children and work and produce wealth in the world.)  This government is to oversee work and child-raising. (Included here would be things like healthcare and education). As businesses in our world becomes increasingly complex, its helpful to see these entities as vast partnerships between families taking the raw materials of the earth to produce fruitful things. The charge of this government is to raise children to know and fear God, to grow up, get married and raise other children. And raise your children to work hard with their hands and their minds and bring fruit and wealth and life from the raw materials of this world. We do these things in the light of the gospel of Jesus and in obedience to God’s law. This means that generous hospitality (a key note describing the homes of God’s people) is integral to the life of this government whether around the dinner table or in the businesses started. The father and his family and the various businesses and institutions they produce answer to the rule of Jesus. 

The Church: The church is given the ministry of grace and peace, of word and sacrament. The church is charged with discipling the nations, bringing all the peoples of the earth to recognize Jesus’ Lordship, to trust in his death and resurrection and to do all that he commands. For this unbelievable task they are to bear the Word, the sacraments (water, bread and wine), and discipline. Elders are to bear this authority as the church gathers for worship and calls all the peoples to worship and obey God in every sphere of life. We declare the good news of what Jesus has done for us in his life, death and resurrection and testify to his ascension as King and Lord. In other words, the means the church is given for this gargantuan task is simply its worship. We worship the Triune God in Spirit and truth. We worship as His covenant people (in person, preferably without masks, with bread and wine and cleansing water) and the nations are transformed. The church and her ministers answer to Jesus.

The Magistrate (or the State): The government is given the ministry of justice. She bears the sword to punish evil-doers and ensure that the just are free to flourish. The heated arguments in our day about the definition and nature of justice are therefore really vital debates that Christians must engage in biblically. Good governments insure that people and their businesses and families are free to thrive and bear the kinds of fruit they are commissioned by God to produce. Different governmental systems are more or less effective at doing this. Studying U.S. civics will expose you to the rather marvelous way that the U.S. system was designed to do precisely this. Monarchies attempt this in other ways.But regardless of how the system is organized, the magistrate answers to Jesus. 

None of these three “bring the kingdom of God,” rather they testify and submit to the kingdom of God through their faithfulness in doing what Jesus commands in the sphere’s they are given responsibility over, and using the means that God has given them to do so. All three are accountable to defend and execute justice and mercy with the authority they’ve been given (the magistrate with the sword, the church with her discipline, and in family and businesses according to just balances.) The temptation is to always put too much stock in the ability of any one of these to do too much. Our age is particularly prone to believing that the magistrate might save us from poverty and disease and suffering. But this isn’t what the magistrate is designed by God to do. The family cannot function as the church. The church can only supplement the work of the family. When the church fails to be faithful to her calling or her gifts, she should be called to repentance. When the magistrate fails to be faithful to its calling (corruption) or when it reaches beyond its established boundaries (tyranny), it should be rebuked and called to repentance. 

The failure of any of these three effects the collapse of society. The faithfulness of these three can be used to aid the flourishing of the other two. Strong churches shape the life of the family and call the magistrate to faithfulness (think Reformation Scotland). Thriving families lead to thriving economies for everyone and can result in a healthy state and churches. While these three spheres have different lanes, the lanes are deeply interdependent. 

When we confess Jesus is Lord we are making a politico-religious-cultural statement. He rules everything. He forgives sin and he calls all people, all institutions to repent, to be forgiven and to submit to his reign in everything. 

What Singing the Psalms Does

One of the things we are trying to build at Trinity is a robust culture of Psalm singing. We’re at the very beginning of this work and so we’re trying a bunch of different routes to this destination - a bit of a convulsive start to what we pray will be a pervasive part of Trinity’s culture not only on Sundays, but in every context where we gather. We imagine parishes, elder meetings, men’s and women’s gatherings to be marked by singing the Psalms together. There are a number of different reasons for us to pursue this sort of thing, but there are a few particularly reasons that are vital to the cause of discipleship in our age. 

1. We need instruction in how to pray in our age.
   God promises us in Romans 8 that the Spirit will instruct us in how to pray, because we do not know how to pray as we ought. The primary tool the Spirit wields in teaching us how to pray in an age where all our allegiances can be so easily confused is the Psalter. Far too many Christians either abandon the Psalms altogether or see them merely as a kind of divine permission for self expression. The idea being that the Psalms are filled with all kinds of joy and doubts and anger, therefore we are allowed to express our own joys and doubts and anger. But the Psalms are not primarily about Divine permission. They are about Divine instruction. The Psalms reframe the world, they redefine it for us again. They help us to discern history and our neighbor and the acts of God all around us. Here is a collection of prayers that teach us to pray rightly in the face of God’s providential work all around us.
   

2. We need instruction in what to feel in our age.
   In an age where people are either trained to abandon their emotional life altogether or they are utterly ruled by their emotional life. The Psalms teach us what to feel and when. Our emotional lives are simply the expression of our loves, our fears, our anxieties and our allegiances. They are vitally important in our obedience to God and they must not rule us. Rather, me must, as in everything else, submit them to God’s word. Here in the Psalms we learn how to conform our emotions to the realities described in its songs and prayers. We learn when to rejoice. We learn what to hate. We learn how to be thankful. Our age has often made a god of what we feel. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood are no longer in submission to God and his decrees, but rather are merely expressions of our own feelings. The Psalms offer an oftentimes jarring corrective to this sort of thing.
   

3. We need the right enemies and the right conflict in our age.
   We live in a divided age and oftentimes those divisions are dictated to us from secular sources named CNN or Fox News. The problem isn’t so much the reality of division, its where they tend to draw the lines. The Psalms are the songs of God’s hosts - his armies. And if you approach them expecting that here, in the sphere of Christianity and religion we are escaping the divisions that are so prevalent in our day you will not understand them. Here are enemies defined by God. Here is a framework for understanding the good guys and bad guys, good and evil, and the great conflict at the heart of our history. We learn how and where to fight in the Psalms from God Himself. 

So let us sing these Psalms with brothers and sisters, children and old, in defiance of the old dragon and his children. May we sing loudly, having our affections reordered and our allegiances set right. 

Go to Church

My goal here is simple: I want you to go to church.  I want the church to eat bread and wine together again and be shaped by the singing, reading and preaching of the word of God. My hope is that churches will unapologetically consider their work together (liturgy) as being absolutely essential for the functioning of society. There are, of course, caveats to be considered when gathering during the continuing spread of COVID-19, but those caveats are getting thinner as more and more data is made available (here are the CDC statistics breaking down mortality by age groups) and increasing numbers of epidemiologists release their collective take on the public and social response (Here is a link to the Great Barrington Declaration). 

To summarize the data - COVID disproportionately harms older, compromised individuals and poses very little danger to younger, healthier members of the population. To summarize the statement from the scientists: the vast majority of the population needs to resume life as normal and expect to get COVID. Vulnerable populations should be isolated and supported when possible. Their assessment is that current masking and isolation policies are doing significant long-term harm to the health of the population and society. 

So, with those things on the table, I’ll put the caveats right up front: Older, health-compromised members of the church should be accounted for and cared for in ways that protect them from the spread of the virus. This support should not be compulsory, but small additional offerings can be made to serve these people, even as you encourage them to be a part of the church. We offer outdoor seating and a radio transmission to nearby cars - where people can be with the church, receive communion, and worship with God’s people - even if from behind some steel and windows. 

But regardless of how one goes about assessing the risks involved with gathering for worship, my argument below isn’t contingent on that assessment. Gathering for worship has always been riskier than not gathering for worship. There are social and health risks. These might be greater now than they were a year ago, but they are not so grave as they’ve been in the past as saints gathered for worship in far more devastating situations. The bigger issue is that we’ve spent the last 7 months inadvertently learning to avoid the risks associated with gathering for the church’s worship.  We have learned that the church’s gathering in person is optional when its risky. We must unlearn this lesson. Coffee and your couch and an internet connection will always be safer and more convenient than dressing up, getting in your car and going to a place where a bunch of people are gathering in the name of the triune God. 

Now, here are some reasons why the church must gather and worship:

1) You need the Church

The church, gathered as the people of God, administers the word and the sacrament to God’s people. These aren’t things you can receive adequately through an internet connection and some crackers and grape soda from the kitchen. These things require physical presence, they call for the practice of gathering and filling a space with song and prayer and preaching. The past few decades have seen many of us evangelicals reduce the worship of the church to either an intellectual event or an entertaining one. Those things can be done rather effectively online. But that is not what the covenant renewing worship of the church is. The church gathers together in the presence of God to renew her covenant together with Him. You can’t do that in your living room, whilst wearing your PJ’s and sending emoji’s to your friends on zoom. This is a tremendous and holy thing that requires the church’s physical presence. 

This gathering, with its singing and confessing and praying and preaching and reading is not simply a nice pick-me-up for your private spirituality. It is the fundamental means by which the Triune God gives and sustains our faith. It is the primary means by which we commune together with his Spirit. It is the primary means by which we are to be exhorted to believe and to obey. It is meant to pour steel into your spine as you live courageously in a world gone mad. You do not merely go to church because you believe, you go to church in order to believe. Pastors, your people need the worship of the church. Do not withhold this fundamental means by which we are to feed and care for God’s sheep. 

2) The City needs the Worship of the Church

The current virtue messaging of our day is that our city needs people to be isolated, masked, and to avoid any and all larger gatherings. This has been packaged as how to “love your neighbor” or as I just saw on a pretty nifty TV screen here at DIA, “Do the right thing.” Christians have been told to put others before themselves and refrain from gathering, or at least to exercise severe restrictions when gathering. I want to contend that the gathering of God’s people to worship is one of the most urgent needs our neighbors have - whether they recognize it, show up, or not. The gathered worship of the church has a leavening effect on the surrounding culture. The preached and sung Word of God, the confession of sin, the assurance of pardon, communion and a benediction wherein God’s people are sent out to bear witness to their neighbors of God’s good reign are some of the greatest gifts given to our city. Where it happens, it transforms the culture of a city. It alters the political and social discourse (just consider: as bad as the political discourse was in 2016, how much worse is 2020?). Where this practice is lost, there is incalculable loss to the surrounding city. The worship of the church preserves the world. And so, Love your neighbor by gathering for worship with the church. 

3) God is worthy of our Worship

The church inherits glorious gifts when she gathers for worship. Her worship offers gifts to even pagan cultures. But mostly, the church gathers to honor and to give thanks to God as his covenant people. His name deserves to be praised and declared in our cities. He has given us and continues to give his people gift upon gift, kindness upon kindness. Should we not gather as God’s people to acknowledge these gifts, to give thanks for these gifts and to honor him by asking for more (Psalm 104)? There are crises that may occur that could prevent the church from gathering, but these must be rare and grave. This is the fundamental labor of God’s people that gives shape and life and meaning to all our other labors in the world - be they in the professional world or in seeking to serve our neighbors. We honor God here, together, so that we might honor him everywhere.

So Christian, go to church. Worship Jesus. If prudent for your particular situation, wear a mask, sit a little further apart or sit outside, but do not forsake the gathering together of God’s people. This forsaking is no longer merely the habit of some, it is increasingly the habit of most. You need it, our neighbors needs it, and God is worthy of it. 

Blood and Fire

The Scriptures are filled with blood and fire and we should pay attention when we see them, particularly when we see them together:

1 - In Genesis 3 as Adam and Eve rebel against the commands of God they are promised the coming of this new horror: death. It is the enemy that will devour their lives and the lives of their children. But even as God spells out the ways that death will mark their lives, he offers a promise and what will be the mark of his covenant presence with his people. An animal is slaughtered and they are clothed with its skin. Blood is spilled and their sins are covered. Death will drive them from the Garden Sanctuary of Eden, and a flaming sword is set at its entrance. They can only return to God’s Sanctuary with blood and fire. 

2 - In Exodus, as Israel gathers at the foot of Mount Sinai to meet with God, Moses is invited into God’s sanctuary at the top of the mountain- the place where God will meet him. As God establishes his covenant with God’s people, blood is spilt and fire descends onto the mountain (Exodus 24-25). Here as God’s people are bound to him in his presence, there is blood and there is fire. 

3 - In Leviticus, God gives detailed instructions as to how the priestly representatives of God’s people are to approach his presence in the sanctuary. And what it immediately evident is the presence of blood and fire. There is no casually entering into the dwelling place of God. There must be blood and we must pass through fire.

4- In the coming of Jesus, his sacrifice on the cross and the outpouring of his Spirit at Pentecost there is again, blood and fire. Jesus’ own blood now speaks a better word than that of bulls and goats - but it is blood that we must have to cover our sin and bind us in covenant to our God. And the Spirit fills the disciples marking them with the fire of his presence as “tongues of fire” rest on each of them. The sanctuary has moved from a garden to a mountain to a tent to a temple to a people, but the only way into this sanctuary is through blood and fire. 

When we gather as the church each Sunday, we gather in God’s sanctuary. We come by the blood of the new covenant as we drink wine, and we come through fire as God’s Spirit has promised to attend to our worship. Fire and Blood. 

Do Not Love the World

"You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

James 4:4

I was recently reading about the preaching ministry of George Wishart in Scotland in the bloody days of the Scottish reformation. After preaching one day in Dundee an assassin came at him with a knife. Wishart fought and disarmed his assailant and then protected the would-be assassin from the mob that wanted immediate reprisal. Soon afterward he asked a young John Knox to accompany him in his itinerant ministry and to carry a two handed sword. Knox was known as “a man well hated” by Robert Louis Stevenson as he was faithfully contentious in his own day even while being perhaps Scotland’s greatest historic gift to the world (outside of whisky). There was an open conflict in those days that was very often physical as well as theological and political. A conflict that should instruct us as we’ve grown conflict-averse.

You do not love God nor your unbelieving neighbor by minimizing the distinctiveness of belief in Jesus and obedience to his law. Many of us, over the past couple decades, in church planting, preaching and general mission to secular places have put a fair amount of effort into translating Christianity into terms and emotional frameworks that are understandable and even appealing to secular people. We softened the hard, craggy edges of Scripture - both theologically and ethically. We, in many cases, succumbed to the modern redefinition of "love" to mean empathy or insuring people were kept from unpleasant feelings rather than the more objective standards for love set forth in the law and explained throughout Scripture. Along the way, I think a fear of God - of unfaithfulness to his word -was subtly replaced with a fear of being perceived as stupid, quaint, bigoted or unloving by the people we hoped to win to the gospel. This is a legitimate conflict of interest. We want our neighbors (which in Denver mean typically young, progressive, and functionally secularist) to believe the gospel and worship Jesus. But there are all sorts of things in the bible and in the way the bible says things that are hard. And these things aren't just hard in content, they are said in ways hard ways. Many have compromised the content and tone of God's words in order to appeal emotionally and intellectually to pagan people. We've called it graciousness, winsomeness, or being missional. But these compromises are a reduction of faithful witness - witness that always requires conflict.

The grace that is extended in the gospel is a grace that names sin, pointedly, sometimes mockingly. At the very heart of the invitation of the gospel is forgiveness for sins, but it is a forgiveness that accompanies repentance. The grace set forth in the gospel is a grace that saves sinners from deserved wrath and hell, in other words it is a grace that speaks in the harshest imagery and with the most devastating threats imaginable when confronting unbelief and its moral fruit. The grace declared in the gospel is a grace that forgives and justifies and then demands (as well as empowering for) obedience to all the laws of our King. The grace of the gospel demands an absolute allegiance to the rule of Jesus and everything he commands in Scripture - and these aren't just the "red letters." It is everything the whole of Scripture commands. These are hard truths, but if allegiance to Jesus means anything it must mean allegiance to Jesus when he says things that would get you kicked out of the party, the governor's office, or your neighbor's house.

But it isn't simply the content of what the Bible says that we must stand by, it is also the way in which God says what he says in the bible. If we haven't grappled with how Paul can exhort God's people to gentleness while also hoping his opponents cut off their genitalia, then we haven't let the bible itself tell us how to be "gentle." If we haven't considered that the same God who instructs us in how to pray and sing the imprecatory Psalms also commands us to love our enemies, we haven't allowed the complexity of the biblical world to shape our engagement wit the world. Paul set his life's mission to see those who don't know God to be won by the gospel and he also says, "If anyone does not love Christ, let him be damned." Biting satire is used to confront unbelief and immorality throughout the Scriptures by everyone from the prophets to Jesus himself. In other words, if you approach the bible with the idea that love requires an empathetic approach to sin and unbelief, you'll wind up condemning most of the people in the bible, including Jesus. Allegiance to Jesus means learning to not flinch or get embarrassed when he starts pining on or telling his rough jokes at the dinner party.

God establishes a paradigmatic division in Genesis 3 that runs throughout the entirety of the bible. Jesus says this division will divide families. Paul says it changes how you hear God's law - either with a hostile ear or a submissive one. Revelation portrays this division as open warfare until the end. There is no peace in this division. I think our world feels this division and tries desperately to explain it in other, secular terms - be it racialist, socio-economic, political or educational constructs. The division you feel in the world is actually real. It hasn't gotten more significant because there is an election or because of differing opinions on how to deal with COVID-19. It is a division that goes all the way down and has existed from Genesis 3 onward. But get the division right - it is a divide between belief and her children and unbelief and her children. This divide marks out the world's enemies. And if you don't rightly identify your enemies you can never obey Jesus' command to love them. And if you don't learn from Jesus how that divide manifests itself morally and ethically and theologically, you won't know whose side your on. And if you don't learn from the bible how to love your enemies, how to speak to your enemies - you'll think its about being nice and find yourself inadvertently claiming to know more than Jesus about how to be Christ-like or more than Nehemiah about how to speak to an unbelieving culture.

Faithful witness in this age requires conflict. But the conflict our Lord requires has fallen into disfavor among many Christians in our day. This conflict gets called all sorts of names: Pride, Unloving, and Obnoxious. And while there are many proud men (and women) whose fighting does fail to aim at the repentance and redemption of our enemies, and there is something to be said for a reasonable "winsomeness" in our tartness - I do not see an overabundance of courageous fighting in the corridors of Denver's evangelicalism or in the reformed "resurgence" that has grown up around us. I see a insidious love of self and cowardice masquerading as love for neighbor and a concern for mission. Pride is not conviction concerning what is true, it is a refusal to submit to God and his word. There is nothing more unloving than to pretend like everything is mostly fine as unbelief spins into chaos and madness. Winsomeness must aim to win people to an actual Lord who has declared actual things to be sin, and their consequences to be hell. Faithful witness in word and life should expect opposition from unbelief, and not assume we’re doing something wrong. We do not serve the cause of Jesus by reducing the claims and demands of Jesus. We do not love our neighbors by pretending the justice of God isn't really coming.

We have lusted after friendship with the world, covering over whatever might offend or be misunderstood and we are dangerously close to becoming enemies of God. May we repent, turn again to the Scriptures and learn again how to prophesy, how to live and how to read our world.

Christian Friendship & Sanctification

Ryan will be hosting a two-night gathering on friendship and sanctification in the weeks to come (October 13th and November 10th). We’ll spend some time on a couple of things for each of those nights: (1) Walking through an anatomy of how God tends to sanctify us and (2) discuss what it would look like to ask questions in everyday conversations to intentionally contribute to that sanctification process [you can RSVP here]. This post is a few meandering thoughts and a sort of primer for these nights.

Bonhoeffer’s Take on Community

This year, I’ve set some time aside to read works by or about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The other morning, I was reminded of how central the person of Jesus and the church were to how he saw the entire Christian life. To live in obedience takes abiding in Christ. To abide in Christ, while having significant implications for individual devotion, also necessitates abiding in His church. In his famous work Life Together, Bonhoeffer states, “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this” [my emphasis added]. To many, ’living in community’ has become a cliché and its connection to the church merely dangles by a thread. To others, greater intentionality to the local church sounds really nice but what does it actually look like to be committed to a community that is in and through Jesus Christ? Let me try to offer an answer from a few different levels.

At 30,000 Feet

“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence…” (2 Peter 1:3). This passage isn’t directly stating that God has given us other people for life and godliness but He is saying that, for your sanctification, all the instruments necessary are present. That includes being brought into a people, wise people that God places as major investors in our dross removal. Are there realms of the human experience that we prefer not to invite others into? Where can we tend to resist God using our Christian friendships (i.e. the people in the pews around us and the people that contributed to the history of the church before us)?

Above The Tree Line

Thinking back to that statement by Bonhoeffer, we need to see those that are in the church through Jesus. This reminds us that the different members of His body are not an autonomous herd but a collective unit that the Spirit has christened us with a new name. The brothers and sisters that you interact with each day are those with whom God is pleased. Jimmy does not get more of Jesus’ name than Sheri, we as a people gain the name of Christ as one body. Does the interest we take in others reflect God’s pleasure in them (imperfect, though they may be)? 

Draw this to mind this week: the engagement of the people in any local church is not mere happenstance, it is a holy people that God has called to gather at the specific cross streets they are on, for each person’s good and God’s glory (1 Peter 2:9).

Beside One Another

For a moment of scanning our own heart’s commitment to the local church in this, think of the most recent time that a brother or sister in Christ brought some of their life circumstances into conversation with you. It could have been that they were asking for your input, or they could have simply been sharing about their job, their kids, their weekend, or their suffering:

• What informed your thoughts about them as they spoke to you? The emotions you felt toward them? 

• What drove your questions and the words you chose to speak to them?

• Did you feel at a loss with what they were going through? 

• What was your hope for them?

The wonderful thing about how God works in all this: God’s Spirit is simultaneously working to give you all you need for life and godliness as He simultaneously provides it for the friend in front of you. The belief that you’d need to change them, fix things for them, or be liked by them will get you nowhere. While you seek to help them, your focus mainly needs to be on whether your intentions are honoring God. The reality is that God is doing something significant in the hearts of both of you to sanctify two holy people.

In all of this, there is a call for revival in Christian friendship. In this being such a great need, I invite you to spend a couple of nights this fall to work through a framework for being friends that seek to help sanctify one another in the local church. May God grow us in wisdom and grace!

Singing Psalms Together

One of the many gifts that God has given the church over the last 40 or 50 years has been a resurgence of thoughtful and faithful music for the church's worship as song-writing has flourished and more musicians have written music to be sung by the church. While some of the music is (rightly) derided as being excessively cliche'd or theologically vacuous, we have been given a great deal of music that both honors Jesus and lifts the affections of God's people. We should give thanks to God for his kindness to us over these decades, we should also acknowledge a significant loss that has accompanied this gift: Much of the church has given up the practice of singing and praying the Psalms in worship together.

But here in the Psalms we have the church's prayer book. Here is a marvelous book of songs, meant to teach us about the character and beauty of God, to shape our emotional life, and to help us give utterance to our longings and fears. Here in the Psalms we find what God commands us to ask of him in a world like ours. Here is how to pray for the sweetness of God's presence. Here is how to see and pray in a world where there are very real enemies seeking to destroy the faith of God's people. Here is how to see the glories of God's gifts in the mountains, and in people, and in his great redemptive works. Here is how to ask God for justice - and for mercy. Learning to sing the full range of the psalms can pour steel into your spine, encourage those who need encouragement, and give words, biblical words and images, to the prayers of God's people.

And so, as we continue to enjoy the good music that God has given the church in recent decades, as we savor the rich songs that have come to us through the centuries, we want to return to a steady diet of singing and praying together from the Psalms. We'll me adapting music that other churches have used to regain the use of the Psalms in worship and we have some musicians writing musical settings for Psalms that we can sing together. This weekend we will start to weave this into our weekly gatherings as we sing Psalm 100. Our hope is that we could build a bank of Psalms that we know and love as a church and can continue to shape our life together as a community.

Unmasking Masks or No Masks

Trinity,
 
Much of the New Testament was written to address a whole variety of divisions that kept arising in the church's early decades. Divisions over which kinds of food one could eat, what day the sabbath should be celebrated, whether the ancient festivals were binding on worshippers of Jesus.  There were even debates over whether or not gentile believers needed to be circumcised in order to be counted among God's covenant people. In other words, much - if not most - of Scripture, and therefore God's words to His people, are concerned with addressing our terrible propensity of dividing and building tribes around the wrong things.  All of these divisions represent a terrible instance of unbelief - a failure to trust in the work of Jesus and therefore, love His people. 
 
In the face of unbelieving divisions, the New Testament calls us to gather together as God's people in worship, to share communion, to show deference to one another, and to embody our unity in the face of worldly divisions.  Doing these things are a kind of protest against those divisions and a confession of faith in the singular work of Jesus.  So, before we address the recent mandate passed down by Governor Polis regarding mask-wearing, I want to call you to worship Jesus with His church on Sunday.  I want to call you to avoid silly divisions and judgments and breaking fellowship with other Christians who choose to wear masks or not wear masks. I am consistently amazed by how different God's priorities are in Scripture as compared to our present day preoccupations with political ideologies. The Scriptures call us to worship Jesus, to love one another (which even looks like deferring to one another's weaknesses), and to hold fast to what is true. With this call, come worship in unity on Sunday. 
 
Governor Polis has issued a statewide mandate requiring those of us, 11 and older, to wear a mask when inside a building for the next 30 days.  Many of us see this as a simple way to love our neighbors and slow the spread of a disease that has led to the death of thousands of people.  Many of us see this as a further example of unconstitutional over-reach by the magistrate issuing illegal edicts to gain political points. It’s okay if you see it both ways. Currently, we lease our space on Sundays from a church that has communicated that we need to abide by the Governor's edict while in their building.
 
We believe that the New Testament commands us, above all else, to worship Jesus, to express our unity and love for one another, particularly by sharing the word and communion together.  Because we believe this, we must prioritize what the Scriptures prioritize and so we’re going to ask that you to wear a mask on Sunday when inside the building or outside if the 6 feet of social distancing cannot be maintained between households.  It will be awkward and your singing will be muffled.  But instead of focusing on the constitutional issues or the issues surrounding personal liberty or how mask-wearers love people better than non-mask-wearers, we want to call everyone to worship Jesus in the unity of the faith. We’d even ask for you to sit inside with us if at all possible. We have plenty of space with access to the balcony, and while it is nice to sit outside, it’s a great thing to see everyone together in the same room.  Additionally, we’ll ask everyone to sing particularly loud!  Don’t protest masks. Protest silly divisions and the refusal to love. Protest rugged individualism that refuses deference.  Protest apathy in the face of God’s call to worship together and share communion together in person (barring personal sickness).  

Come and gather with us this Sunday at 9am or 10:30am to worship, sing, eat together, and to hear God's word. I'll be preaching on Proverbs 6 and the things that God hates and how we find wisdom for living there.  We'd also love for you to join us at 8:30am on Sunday to pray for the two worship services and our city.

Until Quite Recently...

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more “just” or “ordinate” or “appropriate” to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same…. St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

- C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Some Next Steps

Just two Sundays ago Trinity gathered for worship in the parking lot of ACA only a few days after the video of George Floyd's death went public. It was a strange Sunday for a number of reasons, among them was me, preaching from the back of a pickup truck while standing in the rain, with many of you listening from your cars through the radio. Protests were starting to spread to other cities outside of Minneapolis. There was (and is still) a dark weight hanging over our city. At the time, the issue of race, George Floyd's killing, and what was unfolding in our cities dominated every media source in our lives. It had replaced COVID as the newsworthy issue of the day and it was frankly overwhelming. To watch a black man killed by police officers on video, popping up in twitter feeds and instagram feeds right next to the picture of the latte art and the funny video of the toddler toddling across the floor was a horror that I didn't know how to process emotionally in the moment, nor as events unfolded in our own city.

When we gathered on that Sunday, I called us to a particular kind of faithfulness in this moment and in our city. As the video brought to the surface again a history of racist evils in our country perpetrated by many white folks over several centuries, as that turned to societal rage and a storm of opinions, social expectations, and all manner of (right) calls for justice, the great temptation was and is (still) to forget that we are creatures. In the deluge of information and videos and longings (again right) for the world to be marked by justice and light, we can begin to feel the pressure to act and speak and think with the power and clarity of gods. Put down that weight. We are but creatures.

The other temptation will come as the news cycle changes and the "next thing" consumes news feeds and becomes a distraction from the pain and trouble. We are a culture that is constantly hungry for the next outrage, the next terror - the next distraction. White evangelicals have a checkered and short history of getting impassioned about these issues for a few weeks and then moving on to the "next thing" with everyone else. Racial issues, generational poverty, and the animosities that exist in our city are the kinds of challenges that will take centuries and lifetimes of faithfulness to resolve. (That's right, I said centuries.) But it is the promise of God that He is causing justice/righteousness to rain down and fill the earth. So as the sense of urgency in our culture wanes in the coming days, may our love for our neighbor in obedience to our King and God not grow cool or even cold.

I want to spell out a bit, the kinds of things I believe we should be doing right now as a church community. I mentioned some of these on May 31st, but I want to expand a bit on them here.

1. Pray. Be reminded of our collective and individual dependence on God's power and his mercy. Ask him for his wisdom and comfort both for yourself and for our neighbors and for the magistrates who govern. Ask him to bring repentance and faith. Don't do this just once - make it a habit. Too often we only pray for immediate needs and in the vein of a personal religion. We must pray eschatological prayers - prayers directed at God's stated purposes for the world in light (or darkness) of present circumstances.

2. Read your Bible. Get the bible into your blood and bones. Let it give you, in the power of the Spirit, a backbone to know and love what is true and good in the face of so much falsehood and evil. May it become the thing you bleed as we confront real life problems - not just in our personal lives but in our neighborhoods and city.

3. Gather with the church and celebrate the coming and present reign of Jesus. There are few things more important for the purposes of biblical justice and truth and righteousness and goodness than the people of God - from every identity group that the world has attempted to separate us into - gathered all across our city, even in different congregations, but united in confessing the good reign of Jesus in the midst of a world that sometimes feels like its spiraling into darkness and chaos. It is not. And one of the clearest signs of this is the regular, faithful worship of God's people throughout the streets of our city.

4. Be faithful in your immediate responsibilities. The great work of God is not a revolution, it is the growing of a garden. It begins with the cultivation of faithfulness and fruitfulness in your own life, in your home and marriage, and in relationships with your actual neighbors.

5. Mourn with your neighbors and Listen to them. Jesus commanded us to weep with those who weep. Do not be calloused to the pain and fears of our neighbors. We live and worship surrounded by people who have experienced racial animosity and structural racism. We should be aware of their stories and their pain. One of the greatest gifts of the past two weeks has been a handful of conversations with friends who have directly suffered evil and injustice on account of their skin color. To hear their stories and to sit with them in their tears as these events have brought back past memories and current fears has been a gift I haven't deserved. Go to your friends and ask them to share some of their stories if they are willing. It has been eye-opening to become increasingly aware of current bigotries in our supposedly progressive city. There are a whole lot of books to read and videos to watch about racism and the history of racial injustice in our country. Some are biblical and remarkably helpful - most, frankly aren't. But none of them compare to a few lengthy and gracious conversations I've had with actual people.

6. Find ways to serve and changes to advocate for. I've been reminded since the beginning of the COVID shutdown of how much need and generational poverty is in our backyard as a community. The west side of Denver is the kind of place where $800,000 homes are across the street from Section 8 housing. We don't have to go far to find real people to serve and pain to witness. We should want all of our neighbors to worship Jesus and we should want to find ways to practically meet the needs of our neighbors as well. This will require real relationships and friendships with your neighbors. And it will involve the mobilization of different parts of our church to serve those people.

A few months ago our elders began a discussion on how to better serve the physical needs of both those within our congregation and in the neighborhoods surrounding our congregation. The first step was the formation of our diaconate fund. Recently, a handful of representatives from each of our parishes have started meeting to both build an infrastructure for identifying needs in our church as well as in our surrounding neighborhoods and then matching those opportunities with resources and people from our church. These systems will be unfolding informally and eventually formally at Trinity over the coming weeks and months. Get involved with that process, seek out opportunities to help and identify potential opportunities for members of our church to get involved with.

Revelation ends with the image of a tree in the heart of God's city - a city that has filled the earth even now. The promise is that this tree will be for the healing of the nations. This is the promise of God and the great work of the church. We are to worship and work and tangibly love as God heals our particular nation of its terrible sickness. This sickness is sin and rebellion against God. This sickness is racial vainglory and animosity. It is a history stained with slavery. It is a present filled with secularism and secularist answers to problems that have everything to do with God. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). In other words the world will be filled up with the real, tangible knowledge of the glory of the Lord. This is the promise of God and this filling is not happening like some switch getting flipped in the future, but rather the dawn has already broken - the world is even now being filled with this glory. The great work of the people of God is to bear witness to this glory and to uncover it even now. May we be faithful in this task.